That’s fascinating, and I agree with you. Why the US hates the idea of high-speed rail is beyond me, especially because they prided themselves so much on the rail system they put together earlier in their development. In any case, the US can’t do much of anything with its debt-to-GDP as high as it is right now. They can hardly keep from shutting the government down entirely because they won’t even agree to a government budget.
Also, the US is 9.14 million sq. km of land, whereas the EU is 4.29 million sq. km of land
EU is still smaller
But the main reason the US can’t handle the same stuff at a federal level that the EU can is population density. The US government can’t afford to nationalize rural healthcare given how rural the US can be–especially with their debt/GDP at the moment. Give it another few hundred years and the US might catch up to Europe in that respect.
deleted by creator
To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there’s a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.
I go out of my way not to do so. Whenever I search for some specific items and see “Sponsored,” I’ll scroll down until I get the same listing without the ad link.
No, there is no coursework past a master’s thesis. For the last typically ~3-4 years of graduate training, everything that you’re doing is original research. If your research isn’t good enough or done correctly, you will never get a PhD. You also have to defend your dissertation. Getting a PhD from a reputable university does mean that what you say, specifically related to your research area, is correct.
Unless you’re in university administration, academia is not well paid. University administrators who are well paid are usually EdDs (essentially, university-focused MBAs) who didn’t take the normal academic route of research first.
Those are extremely few and far between, and they aren’t evolutionary biologists. Behe, the most famous of them, doesn’t have a PhD in biology, but a PhD in biochemistry. Those are vastly different fields, and understanding the evidence for evolution wouldn’t have been relevant to Behe’s PhD. MDs more commonly don’t believe in evolution because MDs are essentially average folks who can memorize stuff really well. MDs don’t receive training in research or how to conduct it, so they’re pretty poor at understanding primary research most of the time.
Someone with a PhD from a reputable university (essentially, one that funds their PhD programs rather than making students pay, and one that doesn’t incentivize publications directly with bonuses) will be an expert in their subject area. Behe would be able to tell you about the biochemistry of sickle cell anemia. Someone with a PhD speaking on an area outside of their expertise is perhaps more likely than the average person to be correct because they could have read and understood most primary sources even outside of their area, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that much more likely. Basically, PhDs speaking on the topic of their expertise are experts, but they’re not experts in everything.
Personally, my PhD made me like the trope of someone who could tell you everything you want to know about some esoteric subject but wouldn’t know how to make a meal.
Getting a PhD produces highly specialized knowledge, not general knowledge.
Pharmacists don’t get PhDs, they get degrees for practice, like MDs. A PharmD doesn’t require being able to understand or conduct original research like a PhD does. Basically, a PharmD requires a really good memory, not necessarily critical thinking.
No, it isn’t; performance != ability, and it’s not clear that cognitive performance declines at all–hence the word “may.”
My claim is that
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings
Nothing more.
The RCT is free to access (if you haven’t downloaded more than three NBER papers; if you have, open the page in a different browser). Scroll down on the page I linked and download it via the button.
Statistically, you can control for variables in OLS regression–that’s literally exactly what the model does when you include more than one variable–and, provided that you got your doctorate in anything that uses statistics, I am sure you know that.
Seasonality is one of the more basic economics concepts. The influence of weather and seasonal illness trends on productivity has been shown in a number of studies (e.g., productivity declines during the flu season). The authors didn’t “show” it because it would be like showing gravity in a physics paper. Some things can be assumed. Also, productivity didn’t have a trend, as was stated in the text that I quoted.
You completely ignored the log transformed results, which the authors note were better fit by the regression than the untransformed data, and which showed less productivity in work from home regardless of whether seasonality was controlled.
Personally, I think people should be able to work from home all they want. Productivity isn’t the only important thing in life, nor is it the only important thing to businesses (e.g., retention of top employees is important). I am wholly against WebMD and all other companies requiring employees to return to the office. All I was doing in my comments was trying to clarify the data on WFH and productivity. There are good reasons to continue to allow WFH, but increased productivity is not one.
I’m going to finish my course prep. You can have the final word here; I don’t have time to continue debating anymore.
First, the RCT is a much stronger study. I’m not sure why you’re picking a fight with a correlational paper when there is a causal manipulation that I linked first.
Second, did you actually read the paper? 1B isn’t the graph of productivity; 1C is. You can’t just look at a graph, either–you need statistics.
"For Output, figure 1B, there is no visible monotonic or linear trend, so a seasonal time correction might be more appropriate here. Moreover, average output appears to be slightly lower during WFH.
For Productivity, figure 1C, the graph is more volatile, which is not surprising for a ratio. There is no clear linear time trend before WFH, but some variation from month to month, so a seasonal correction might be more appropriate. Productivity drops visibly during WFH. Finally, figure 1D plots the log of Productivity, which drops considerably after the start of WFH.
To quantify the WFH effect, and to control for employee and team time-invariant variables (via employee and team fixed effects), we now turn to the regression analyses. Informally, the estimates give us average differences in outcomes before and during WFH for the same employee, controlling for team effects (since employees sometimes switch teams) and time trends.
Table 4 reports WFH effect estimates based on OLS regressions for all three outcome variables, plus the natural logarithm of Productivity, in each case with linear and seasonal time trend corrections. All estimates are in line with the visible effects in the raw data in figure 1.
…
Columns 5 and 6 show that both WFH effect estimates on Productivity are negative, but only the estimate with seasonal time trend is significantly different from zero. We prefer that specification, since both the plot and the linear time trend coefficient indicate that a linear trend is not as appropriate. According to this specification, productivity decreased by 0.26 output percentage points per hour worked. Given an average WFO productivity of 1.36, this estimate corresponds to a 19% drop in output per hour worked. This is economically significant: if employees worked a fixed 40 hours per week, this would imply a drop in output of 10.2 output percentage points in a week. In other words, if employees had not increased time worked during WFH, on average they would have completed only 90 of 100 assigned tasks.
Columns 7 and 8 explain the log of Productivity, which strongly increases the fit of the regression. The WFH effect is negative and significantly different from zero at all significance levels, irrespective of time controls."
Beyond self-reports and perception-based outcomes, most extant studies that I’m aware of have found decreases in real output. For example, a randomized controlled trial published by the NBER found that productivity of employees randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than employees randomly assigned to work in the office:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515
Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home, even though hours worked increased:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721803
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:
About a quarter of my colleagues walk to work everyday. One doesn’t even own a car. I don’t live in a city.
pregananant
There are still people who have terrible American accents in media. Lucifer’s twin, for example, was so ridiculously bad. The only person without an American accent who I’ve ever seen pull one off in media was Hugh Laurie in later seasons of House. I still find most attempts amusing, even with coaching.
Linux is a hell of a drug
deleted by creator
I’m back on my BS is also a solid contributor